The American authors' union Copyright Alliance is angry with the non-profit organization Internet Archive, which wants to promote online access to information. Due to the corona crisis, the internet archive temporarily made 1.4 million e-books widely available via a so-called 'emergency library' a week ago.

The American authors' union Copyright Alliance is angry with the non-profit organization Internet Archive, which wants to promote online access to information. Due to the corona crisis, the internet archive temporarily made 1.4 million e-books widely available via a so-called 'emergency library' a week ago.

Normally, an ebook can only be lent to one person at a time. Other interested parties will be queued until the book is available, but that technical limitation is currently suspended.

That is the Copyright Alliance wrong shot. The copyright advocate argues that Internet Archive "takes advantage of the chaos" surrounding the coronavirus by making the works across authors' back widely available.

"At a time when authors, like many others, can barely afford to rent and put food on the table, Internet Archive is throwing bricks through their windows and looting their homes," writes the director of the Copyright Alliance on his organization's website .

More than five hundred Dutch books in library

The 'emergency library' of Internet Archive mainly contains books from the second half of the twentieth century. Most of the work, over 1.3 million copies, is in English. Several tens of thousands of books are available in Chinese, French, Spanish and German.

A total of 558 books are available in Dutch, including a single work by Gerard Reve ( I loved him and Worried parents ), AFTh. van der Heijden ( Het schervengericht ) and Arnon Grunberg ( Tirza ).

The most recent Dutch books in this library were released in 2015. Most available works come from the first decade of the 21st century (155 books), followed by the nineties (127 books), the eighties (97 books) and the years seventy (79 books).

The Internet Archive emergency library will be available indefinitely until July 1. That date may shift if the U.S. is still in a state of emergency after that date due to the coronavirus.